FreeBSD 4.5 Announcement

I am very pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD
4.5-RELEASE, the very latest release on the FreeBSD -STABLE branch of
development. Since FreeBSD 4.4 was released in September 2001, we
have made hundreds of fixes, updated many system components, made
several substantial performance improvements, and addressed a wide
variety of security issues.

In particular, there have been significant enhancements in the
areas of network communications and filesystems. FreeBSD 4.5
contains improvements to the TCP stack to provide better throughput.
In addition, TCP performance is aided by larger default buffer
sizes. Finally, FreeBSD 4.5 contains new mechanisms to mitigate the
effects of TCP Denial of Service attacks.

The FFS filesystem benefits from a new directory layout strategy
that has demonstrated significantly better performance for
operations traversing large directory structures. Various bugs were
located and fixed in the FFS and NFS code with the help of a
filesystem exercising program originally developed at Apple
Computer, Inc.

Those users doing fresh installations of FreeBSD should note some
changes for newly created filesystems, intended to improve the "out
of the box" performance of FreeBSD. In particular, sysinstall(8)
now enables Soft Updates (a strategy for improving both performance
and reliability of on-disk data structures) for new filesystems it
creates and the newfs(8) program will now, by default, create
filesystems with larger block sizes.

For more information about the most significant changes with this
release of FreeBSD, please see the release section of our web site:

If you can't afford the CDs, are impatient, or just want to use it
for evangelism purposes, then by all means download the ISOs,
otherwise please continue to support the FreeBSD project by
purchasing media from one of our supporting vendors. The following
companies have contributed substantially to the development of
FreeBSD :

Each CD set contains the FreeBSD installation and application
package bits for the i386 ("PC") architecture. For a set of
distfiles used to build ports in the ports collection, please see
the FreeBSD Toolkit, a 6 CD set containing extra bits which no
longer fit on the 4 CD set.

The FreeBSD installation instructions have recently been
significantly enhanced. Chapter 2 of The FreeBSD Handbook,
available online,
provides a complete installation walk-through for users new to
FreeBSD.

Acknowledgments

Many companies donated equipment, network access, or man-hours to
finance the release engineering activities for FreeBSD 4.5,
including Compaq, Yahoo!, and The FreeBSD Mall.

In addition to myself, the release engineering team for 4.5-RELEASE
includes:

Please join me in thanking them for all the hard work which went
into making this release. I would also like to thank the FreeBSD
Committers (committers@FreeBSD.org), without whom there would be
nothing to release, and the many thousands of FreeBSD users
world-wide who contributed bug fixes, features and suggestions.